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Essentially, Ireland can’t afford not to be an American client state — and unlike Britain, France and Germany, can’t even afford to pretend not to be one — and everyone in the Oval Office last Wednesday knew it.

The city of my birth, Minsk — the capital of Belarus, then a Soviet republic and now a Russian client state — was the place where Lee Harvey Oswald got so bored that he packed up and headed back to the U.S., and into into the history books.

A recurring pattern of behaviour was emerging: MBS’s tendency to jettison the traditionally slow and collegiate system of Saudi decision-making, preferring to act unpredictably or upon impulse; and refusing to kowtow to the US, or be treated as head of a backward client state.

For the UAE, Mr Abiy's adventurism is both an opportunity and a risk: Ethiopia could become an important Red Sea power - and an Emirati client state; or a new war in the Horn could jeopardise their gains in Sudan.

The ancient city was the capital of an Arab client state of the Roman Empire that briefly rebelled and carved out its own kingdom in the third century, led by Queen Zenobia.